Memorabilia
by FluffyChipmunk
Summary: Two not-quite adults in purgatory, and Decim will judge them. A rather usual situation for an arbiter, but every pair is unique.
The elevator door clicked open, and a child entered the establishment. She was small, had a heart-shaped face, and was dragging her feet about. She had black hair, not particularly queer, and her eyes were bored even with the pretty stained glass display that would entertain any other child of her age.

The girl was not alone. With her was a fumbling teenager. His gangly limbs moved awkwardly to the beat of which his mop of brown hair swayed. He hadn't quite grown into them yet. His t-shirt was a plain white, and pimples along with freckles dotted his face. His mouth was too small for his long face, and when he smiled, his lips puckered.

The bartender bowed in greeting. His hair is a snow white, and his eyes have crosses imprinted on them. He's beautiful in the coldest way.

"Hello."

The girl spoke. She jumped on a bar stool to sit. She motioned for the teenager to follow.

The boy slid the stool out of its place with a scraping against the mahogany floor of the bar. The seats are a velvet. He sits down, but then he sees the mannequin in the corner. There a mechanical replica of a person sat. A wig of black hair and white streaks was set on the head. The joints were visibly attached to each other, and its head was cocked slightly to the side. The boy shivered.

The girl had seen the teenager stare at the mannequin. She tilted her head slightly to see it better. It wasn't the lack of color or life that frightened the girl, reasons a typical child might sight for the shivers that prickle at the napes of their necks. No, what scared this child were the dolls that flashed before her eyes as she looked at the mannequins' empty hands.

"Welcome to Quindecim. Allow me to introduce myself. I am your bartender, Decim. Now then, if you'll indulge me, I must ask you a question. Do you remember anything just before you came here?"

His tone was emotionless and his face was likewise.

The teenager shook his head, and scratched his hair. "Actually, I don't remember much except my name."

The girl turned a pointed stare to the bartender, Decim. They say eyes are the windows to the soul, and the child knew that better than anyone. Yet, she saw nothing in the white-haired man's eyes.

"I remember nothing, as well," she answered. Her hands folded neatly in her lap. "Although, I presume this isn't real since I'm merely ten, and this is a bar."

"Thank you."

The barman was almost too formal, and his avoidance of the little girl's question was uncomfortably familiar. A memory itched in the back of the teen's head. That tone, that composure. He knew it, but from where was the question. One question, which he couldn't answer.

"What is this place?"

The way the man didn't answer her question was not lost on the intelligent child. But a trait that intelligence gifts you is the ability to see where an answer won't be found. Decim wasn't going to tell her anything.

"I am now about to explain to you what your circumstances are. I ask that you pay close attention.

One: First of all, I cannot answer the question of where you are.

Two: We will now have you play a game.

Three: We will have you choose that game by roulette."

A panel of panels fell behind Decim, covering the stained glass display.

"Four: We will have you stake your lives on the game.

Five: Until the game is over, you cannot leave this bar."

He stood still, waiting for the reactions of the players in front of him.

The teenager spared a glance at how the person beside him reacted. Her expression was identical to the one the bartender held on his face. You couldn't tell what was happening in their minds no matter how hard you try. He, himself was trying to let the information sink in. He didn't really have a choice in this does he?

He couldn't leave the bar without playing the game after all.

The girl was thinking as well. Thoughts raced through her mind. Were there really no exits? Considering that this was probably a dream, she hopped off the stool, and pulled on the teenager's pant leg.

The boy looked down to see a splash of black clashing with the chestnut of the floor. When he felt the sharp tug, he slid off of the seat to follow a child half his size.

"This can't be real," is the first thing he heard as soon as they were out of the bartender's earshot.

"Just say yes to the game, and don't worry about the death aspect of it. Even if you feel pain."

The teenager nodded in understanding, not questioning her conclusion. "My name's Misato Ryuki. Yours?"

"Maki."

He didn't get a surname, but just accepted the incomplete name.

"Would you please press the button?" Decim asked once his patrons were seated back onto the stools.

Where he got the large, red button was a mystery. It looked like it should be in a game show rather than in a modern-style, church-like bar operated by a monotone man.

Ryuki leaned forward, and pressed the button. The panels began to blink with lights, and stopped at the bottom right panel. It flipped over to show the players the game they're about to play.

"A matching game?"

Ryuki's eyebrows furrowed in confusion. The last time he had played a matching card game, he was seven and it was summer camp. Then, he got only more confused as that memory had just suddenly floated into his head with no warning. He couldn't remember anything surrounding that event, but somehow, he knew that it had happened.

Decim nodded, and led them to a large, empty room. From the high ceiling hung a crystalline chandelier. It looked like a giant ballroom ready to have its participants.

Laid out on the floor were a 10 by 10 of cards, all face down. On the backs were pictures of body parts: eyes, arms, legs, and ones unrecognizable to the naked eye. Decim stepped back.

"We roll a die to see who goes first," he said, throwing a die in front of Maki.

She picked it up, and tossed it up in the air. It landed on the concrete floor with a tink, and landed on a five.

"Your turn," she said to the teenage boy.

"O-okay."

Ryuki picked the die off of the floor. He was scared; the body parts were scaring him, and he didn't know why. Something bad was going to happen, he could just feel it.

"One."

It was Decim that spoke the number that landed face up. The single dot stared at Ryuki, though.

He sat down on the floor, crossing his legs in a defensive manner. Maki curled her fingers before flipping over two cards, one with an eye on the back of it, and the other with a hand. A jack and a queen were revealed. Not a match, but suddenly the girl started screaming in pain. Her hand burned like hot coals were touching it.

"Are you okay?" Ryuki asked, worried. His eyes were wide in shock.

Maki held her hand, and nodded. She stared at the cards with wonder and horror. This was going to be a painful game. She flipped the cards back over.

"Your turn."

Ryuki's hand trembled as he reached out to turn the cards over. The backs both had a foot depicted on them. The cards were a joker and a joker. A match. The adolescent breathed out a sigh in relief when screams started back again. He watched as the small child in opposite him started shrieking, and spasming uncontrollably.

"Are you okay?!" He reached out to try to help her, but a foot landed on his cheek. It hurt him, and another memory surfaced. This one of his sister.

He remembered his sister's hand on his cheek when their mother's back was turned. Hana, his sister, had had her own problems. She had failed exams, and she took out that frustration on her little brother. Ryuki remembered just standing there, taking it.

He scrambled backwards. The cards, spectacularly, were still in their original formation. Unmoved by Maki's violent kicks and Ryuki's body moving across it.

Maki was remembering something, too. She was remembering her foot being almost cut off by a knife, at least it felt like a knife. The blade had sank deep in her flesh, and she had screamed like she was screaming in the ballroom. But funnily, she couldn't remember who had sunk it into her heel. Just the mutters of unfamiliar people around.

The pain faded away. She could still remember it, though. She studied the backs of the cards, and flipped over two that had arms on them. They were a match: a two sixes.

Grunting, Ryuki grabbed on to his arm tightly. It felt like lightning had struck it, and the pain was reverberating throughout his body.

Lightning.

A thunderstorm had struck his house. Hana was crying in her room, deathly afraid of the storm. Their father had died in a storm too similar to this one, and both her and her mother remembered it. He had just finished middle school, but he understood why his mother was locked up in the study. She had done that too many times to count, weeping over the things her husband had left behind. Ryuki himself couldn't remember when his father had died; only that he was supposed to have just picked him up from a day-care center.

He turned over two more cards, one with an eyeball on the back, the other with an unidentifiable organ. They were a match.

Maki couldn't see anything. She couldn't see color, light, anything. She had experienced something like this before.

Auntie. She remembered the accident. The train that had hit Aoi. Maki didn't know that her dear aunt had had bipolar disorder, and she only found out about the death when a plane trip to her grandmother's home had ended up being a funeral for her favorite family member. This lack of sensory information from her eyes were like when she was at the funeral. She was crying too hard to listen to what anybody was saying.

Maki gulped back tears. She was done crying. That was what she had promised herself when Aoi died. Yes, she remembered when all of the condolences were given, she refused to cry anymore. Aoi never cried when she was alive, so she wouldn't either. At least, that's what her child brian deduced.

She flipped over two random cards, not bothering to look at their backs. They were a match: two queens. Rather, they were supposed to be queens. In reality they were pictures, caricatures of a woman.

The shouts started again from Ryuki. Terror laced his eyes as more of his life began to make sense. Hana's frustration, his mother's depression, his own anxiety. The guilt his family laid on him, and which he accepted. Whispers started to fill his head, just like they used to.

You're a failure.

You're why he died.

It's all your fault!

All things Hana used to yell, and while listening to the whispers, he stopped shouting.

Maki didn't notice the silence that suddenly filled the entire room after Ruki's shouts had suddenly stopped. Her eyes were on the picture of the queen.

It was her auntie. Auntie Aoi, she had told Maki to call her. Aoi was Maki's father's step-sister, and while Maki's mother and father were away, she had taken her sight-seeing. The last trip they had taken was to an amusement park in Kyoto. They had ordered caricatures, but never got them. They had to meet her parents at the airport soon.

And then another reel of memory washed upon Maki's mind. She was with her parents. It was the third anniversary of Aoi's death. Just like she had promised herself, Maki didn't cry. But the plane had crashed. She remembered the smoke, the flames, the panic of everyone there. She was pretty sure everyone had died on the impact.

"Did we die?" she wondered.

Maki held up her hands, and looked at them intensely. She thought about that knife she had felt earlier. Rather than a knife, she knew that it was just all the bones in her foot shattering.

Looking at the teenager's scrunched up face, she repeated the question, this time to their white-haired, stoic bartender.

"Yes. You are both dead, and I am your arbiter. You can think of this like a purgatory."

"Will we go to hell?"

"No, rather, if you are judged so, you will be sent to the void. However, before judgement can be made, you must finish the game," Decim answered.

The void. That was the one word that had penetrated the mind of Ryuki. Void.

"You're such a klutz!" Hana had yelled at him furiously for over an hour.

Ryuki didn't blame her. It was nearly the fifteenth anniversary of their father's death. His entire family had different ways of dealing with their grief. Grief that he couldn't share, no matter how much he had wanted to. Ryuki wanted to be in school. That had always been his favorite place in the world. His friends were nice, and the teachers taught well. And, if he were honest with himself, anything was better than watching his sister watching their mother mope around and cry constantly. Hana was the only one of them that had tried to keep the family alive. She worked two jobs, and had quit college the year Ryuki turned fifteen.

"I hope you're in heaven," he heard his mother murmur. She was always murmuring, never really speaking. She was always like that.

The angriest Hana had ever been was when she would yell at their mother, telling her to go to the void. Apparently, the void was something that their father had believed in. The void and reincarnation. Hana had adopted those beliefs when he died.

"I'm dead. Am I going to the void?"

Realization hit him like a tidal wave. The thunderstorm. It had been after a particularly bad argument with his sister and mother. It was just like before except this time, their mother had threatened to kill herself. She was crying hysterically. He didn't want to be around when Hana finally made the decision to send their mother to a mental hospital. He hadn't thought about the lightning. He hadn't been thinking when he sat under the maple tree. He had been struck by lightning, and died.

"You must finish the game."

"Okay," Maki said. Her hands turned clammy. She didn't want to be dead, but she needed to accept it soon. That was always her motto, ever since Aoi died.

She randomly flipped over the cards, ignoring the intense spikes of pain. Instead she focused on all of the memories that came to her.

The times when her parents had gone off on business trips, and she was left alone with no one but herself for weeks on end. How she had had to grow up alone when Aoi died. How she had blamed Aoi for her cynical attitude.

Likewise, Ryuki was experiencing his own life. He was bombarded with the feelings his sister had pushed onto him. He used to blame her for it, but by the time he was twelve, he understood why his mother was always crying, and why Hana verbally, and rarely, physically attacked him. When he was just beginning to understand, he had wanted to help his sister, but she forced him to stay out of everything. The emotions he experienced when he had made the idiotic decision of sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm.

"I wish I didn't die," he muttered, closing his eyes. He opened them to see the stack of cards his opponent had collected. She was rolling on the floor in pain, but Ryuki heard the muttering.

"I win," she groaned, tears gathering at the edges of her eyes.

"Please follow me," Decim said. He walked out of the giant room into the bar.

Ryuki offered a hand to Maki. They both walked to the bar.

"Please step into the elevators."

Maki gave Ryuki a child's smile, and stepped into an elevator. The doors closed with a ding, and the two souls were off.


End file.
